pretentiousness's Archives

Yesterday, Amazon launched its Art Marketplace, and I’m really excited. I expect it will vastly expand the art marketplace by inviting the casual shopper. But for brokers, they will need to completely change their business model to respond to this new opportunity.

Is there a casual shopper for art? Absolutely — this is why most malls in metropolitan centers have galleries. I myself was captivated by a Warhol in such a gallery when I was 19 or 20 and ended up buying it, before I even had a car. I started off idly admiring it, came back a couple times over the following days or weeks, and went ahead and got it. If it had not been so accessible, I not only would not have bought it, I would probably not even have paid attention to the art scene at all in my subsequent years.

Up until now, there has been a daunting set of obstacles to online art shopping that is discouraging to all but the most determined customer. There hasn’t been an obvious, stable art exchange online, and it’s hard to figure out what to Google when you’re shopping for fine art (“broker” isn’t the first word that comes to mind for most people). Typically the existing services involve making private inquiries with the dealer just to find out “how many zeroes we’re talking.” These sites are usually badly designed, and there’s often no obvious way to buy the damn thing.

Amazon Gives Art a Shopping Cart

Enter Amazon.

I expect that by making shopping for art as easy as shopping for anything else, and by throwing the might of the Amazon brand behind the effort, Amazon will significantly expand the size of the art market. It removes the aforementioned barriers to entry. Yes, there will be a lot of time-wasting unqualified leads, but at least they will be doing it on the web site instead of the dealer’s phone.

But what of the dealers?

It’s interesting that Amazon Art is strictly a marketplace for established dealers – about 50 at launch. I think this is the right approach, but I expect that won’t last long, if the main Amazon Marketplace is any example. Dealers will get the mighty twin advantages of Amazon’s exposure and e-commerce infrastructure, and the increased sales will make them more comfortable selling to the hoi polloi. Soon, though, individuals like me will be looking to sell into the same marketplace. Will Amazon make it easy for me to compete with dealers? If so, why would anyone use a dealer, when their perceived value was in providing access to potential buyers?

The challenge for dealers will be to clarify what services they can still provide to justify giving them their traditional cut – or any cut at all. Certainly I think even (especially!) Amazon buyers will be more confident buying from established dealers than from individuals; this will translate directly to an increase in a reasonable selling price. Dealers’ experience with actually handling the art (packing and shipping, and even documentation) will also be helpful to the seller and reassuring to the buyer. (Of course, getting the artwork to the dealer may present additional challenges if they’re not local.) The dealer may be able to provide valuable assistance by coordinating appraisals, photography and restoration services.

How will these dealers communicate these value-adds to potential sellers? Hopefully, Amazon will provide a way for would-be individual sellers to make that decision and find the right dealer. In any case, dealers need to immediately rethink their business model.

If I were an art broker

In the face of this new development, the art dealer has a choice. Try to compete for customers against Amazon and go the way of the independent bookseller, or pivot the entire business model to attract sellers instead of buyers.

If I were a broker or a dealer, I would drop everything and start thinking about how to get individual sellers to go through me instead of going through Amazon directly. I would make sure I have a stable of available appraisers, framers, researchers, and conservators. I would make sure I have a great packing/shipping solution in place and make sure all of this is demonstrable to potential customers. Sales figures, customer success stories, testimonials, social media – all of it needs to be ready to go when needed.

My sales staff needs to immediately shift focus. Instead of selling to traditional customers, they need to rope in individual sellers. Certainly, the traditional model isn’t going to evaporate for up to a generation. But the savvy dealer will maximize the opportunity of an expanded marketplace and leave the traditional models to someone else who really wants to struggle.

I tried to make my own Capital One Image Card, where you can upload your own picture. I used my own art (shown here), which made for a cool looking card. It was rejected by Capital One, with the reasoning that it could be deemed “offensive” to others.

Sorry, we were unable to approve the image you submitted

Sorry the image you submitted for your Capital One® Image Card has been rejected. We will not approve any images that contain the following:

I called up and went through the list of all the things you’re not allowed to do (gang imagery, celebrities, copyright infringement etc.) and showed that my image passed the criteria. The lady kept blaming the “back office” and evading me, but eventually I cornered the lady into saying that they weren’t going to print it because it was ugly. “We prefer the verbiage ‘offensive’ to ‘ugly’.”

She also revealed that they’re only looking for snapshots — which is nowhere on their site. Interestingly, they say “pets, or a favorite photo,” and their ads show an evil overlord adding kittens to his. But it seems marmots are off the list.

Update:

I tried again, uploading the one without the mask to see if it was less ugly. Here’s what I got back:

Sorry the image you submitted for your Capital One® Image CardSM has been rejected. We will not approve any images that contain the following:

Celebrities such as actors, musicians, athletes, or cartoons.

If you believe that you have been declined in error, please call us at 1-866-381-0451.

I talked to a nice, not disdainful lady named Dee who asked me who the man was. I told her it was a random ambrotype from the 1800′s. I could have said it was an ancestor and probably gotten it through but I wanted to see if the truth would work. She said that based on what I said she would try to put it through again, no guarantees.

Managed not to waste the day again today. Got up before 8, got the kid to school, did NOT go back to bed. Managed a whole bunch of relevant stuff to future livelihoods.

Idiot plumber flaked out again today. My brother did not flake out, came over and spent a few hours first with my son and then with me working on some income-generating ideas.

I helped out my electrician friend by seizing control of his orphaned domain name (url on the side of his truck 403′s); I’ll help him build his website back up and I’ll be a consultant on low-voltage (networking, audio, video) issues for his business.

I also discovered that one of my hosting accounts had NO domains pointing to it. Got that cleared up now. I unpacked several of the boxes from my office, a peculiar sort of humiliation. And once again faced the stress of not having places for things. A lot of this stuff went to my office BECAUSE I didn’t have places for them in my home. But I really needed some of the books and documents in there.

Finished off setting up a Squid cache proxy server on my virtual dedicated server so Elisa can watch TV in Italy on services that check for domestic IP’s. Gordon did the vast majority of the work, for which I’m grateful. I just had to create some user accounts, test it a bit, and pull reports to make sure it was all working. abc.com doesn’t think much of it (black screen with a simple error message reading “ERROR” appears in red) but it works OK with Hulu.

Started reviewing the termination packet from Adobe. The outplacement service appears to be completely worthless. They review your resume, and you can use their fax machines and stuff, and that’s about it. They don’t actually help you find a job. I wonder how much that cost Adobe? Would it cost as much as, say, a subscription to lynda.com so that I can get some tech training that might actually help me land a new gig? I’m actually going to bring that up with them.

My mjenning@adobe.com email is now bouncing but I can’t seem to get them to at least put my new address in the bounce message, much less forward emails. God that’s annoying. That is going to bite me in the ass for years. That’s easily the worst part of losing my job there.

The weird thing is that I am technically an employee for two more months but I’m cut off from everything. I went down there to have a few beers with my colleagues tonight and I had to use the visitor entrance, get the escort, the whole bit. While there I tried to order software but I’m locked out of that too. I’m still eligible to buy it but now I have to use (shudder) a paper order form. Sheesh.

So here’s a weird thing. I went to an event last night downtown called Dr. Sketchy’s (I’ll do a separate post on that) where I had the opportunity to draw some of MY kind of life drawing models. Afterward I went to talk to the models and the host. They were perfectly nice to me, sweet and encouraging. Couldn’t have been friendlier. But I had a really hard time just being Mike Jennings, some balding schlub who can’t draw. It wasn’t long before I dragged my relationship to Adobe into the conversation, and I realized that it was completely unnecessary, the conversation would not have been any different if I hadn’t said anything.

When the Daily show was doing a bit that compared the 2008 Republican National Convention to the Superdome during Katrina, one scene showed Jason Jones with a handkerchief pressed over his nose and mouth. “I’m here in the print media center… the stench of death is overwhelming…” This kind of got me thinking about the fate of the newspapers, which is unsurprisingly a favorite topic in the news lately. And last night, the Daily Show’s guest was hawking a book in which he claims to be able to save newspapers through schemes like micropayments.

Why I love newspapers:

The feel. The tactile experience of going through the paper. While I don’t smoke or drink coffee, I totally get the idea of the newspaper as being a brilliant part of that hallowed morning ritual.

You feel less dorky taking them into the can with you. You never want anyone to know you’ve brought your laptop into te only place where it’s actually used on your lap.

Regional reporting. ‘Nuff said.

Editors. This is what conventional media in general is hanging onto for dear life, and it’s a good one. For example, an editor would make me actually read this guy’s book before dismissing it out of hand. Fact-checking, editorial review, and so on, the machinery of the Gatekeepers of News Reporting, really are wonderful things in most cases. I will miss the sometimes erroneous assurance that the story has been vetted and it really worth reading at face value. (Side note: If we could harness misinformation in some way, we coud make travel to disant planets a reality. Not even light moves faster than bogus facts on the internet.)

Community. This is one of those tings that one doesn’t really value until one loses it. But reading the Letters page and knowing that these people are in my community and therefore have some degree of relevance and even credibility is an experience I just don’t get on the internet. Don’t get me wrong, I’m part of many strong internet-based communities and I enjoy them very much. But there really is something to be said for a central place to discuss issues with people you may actually see in person at some point.

Newspaper as an Artifact. While a new breed of archaeology is emerging out of data mining in search engines and the Internet Archive wayback-machine for recent historical information, the newspapers remain a tangible artifact of the past, reflecting so much more than just the actual content of the news article. Visual aesthetics of illustration, layout and typography of the day, the ephemeral advertisements and so on make newspapers a unique and valuable key to understanding the past in a way that is much harder for the pure-information approach to archiving news items, stripping out the ephemeral “wastes of bandwidth”.

Now for what I won’t miss about newspapers:

The mess. As soon as I get the rubberband off, the thing seems to explode in an oversized confetti of individual sheets coering all horizontal surfaces. I don’t know how this happens but it’s always been like that for me.

The newsprint ink. Last night, Jon Stewart suggested that newspapers could be saved by impregnating the ink with a highly addictive narcotic substance. Great.

Classified Ads. We’ll be explaining to our chilren in the very near future that we “paid by the line” for “text-only ads” and had to invent a byzantine language of abbreviations just to get one ad in a non-searchable format for just one week. Good riddance. That was stupid even then, but we just had to wait for a sensible alternative to arrive in the format of the Internet, and Craigslist in particular.

The suspicion that unseen forces are manipulating what is and isn’t seen in the paper. Traditional media has tried to paint citizen journalismin the colors of conspiracy theorists but the undeniable fact is that by decentralizing control of the media you throw off the constraints imposed by those who would like to control it. Did you know, for example, that there was a time when what the Chinese government said about what’s going on in its country actually had credibility? Now the media only repeats what the Chinese government says partly out of perfunctory courtesy and partly as an amusing and pathetic counterpoint to what is clearly really happening.

Paying for it. Sorry, Mr. Walter Isaacson, I won’t pay for the news. I know it’s not fair but I still won’t. The iTunes model of minipayments breaks down because (as Stewart immediately pointed out) the song you can enjoy over and over again but the news is ephemeral almost by definition. I will simply use less trustworthy information sources that are free. I will even aggregate the same news items from several untrustworthy sources and triangulate the real story from there rather than subscribe to a trusted source. Even if you could get the toothpaste back into the tube, it’s a leaky tube. You could never prevent the free spread of information; you never had a chance.

Not being in control of the collection of stories. I like being able to effectively build my own newspaper from the stories I’m interested in through RSS.

Regurgitated Reuters and AP stories. Both fine institutions but it always felt like a copout to me. Knowing that I could read virtually the same article in any newspaper devalued mine.

Censorship. Never cared for it much. I have an 18-year-old daughter and a 6-year-old son and I cringe knowing what they have easy access to, and I still don’t much believe in censorship. I understand why other parents want it, but I don’t believe in regional community standards and I still believe that information wants to be free, and trying to censor it is just a giant game of whack-a-mole that just makes the censored information more attractive and leaves you looking as pathetic as a Chinese news outlet.

Lowest Common Denominator. Lame-ass human interest stories are legion, more now than ever before, and especially in TV media. The more time Nancy Grace spends ranting about an “issue” the less interesting and relevant it is to me. But I still think of it as the newspapers’ fault. (I still can’t get over the ancient Bloom County in which the harried, weak-willed newspaper editor was helpless to resist Milo’s clichéd human interest stories: “RUN THAT BABY!!!”. Apparently, I’m not alone.)

The Sports section. Never had any use for it. It was always in my way, and now it isn’t.

But the news isn’t all bad for the papers. I predict that the pendulum will swing back, though the Coriolis Effect of the changing face of media consumption will propel it along a slightly (okay, radically) different path.

People will begin to miss regional reporting and the sense of community that comes with it.

They will get tired of trying to collage many free but untrustworthy news sources to get a sense of the real picture.

They will begin to distinguish articles that actually have a monetary value to them, and understand the value of paying for critical information (example: Expensive industrial trade reports today.)

They will find themselves siloed by their own control of the media. For example, I will continue to read only stories about technology, science, or whatever else I think to put into my RSS feeds, and eventually realize the value of having completely unrelated but occasionally interesting articles thrown in with the stuff I know I will care about.

With luck, the print media will learn to evolve in ways that take these effects into account. Unfortunately I still don’t think they’re ever gonna reclaim the prized 18-24 demo, and maybe an even broader range than that; a few of the things I’ve mentioned are only valued by (let’s face it) old people.

I’ve been experimenting with a patina by Griffith called Silver-Black (I believe I got it from Rio Grande).

It’s instantaneous and very deep black; I believe I’ll try diluting it somehow but that seems a bit dangerous. At any rate, I’m liking this look I’ve been getting by laying down tissue and getting it wet (with water), then painting the patina along the edges of the tissue and letting capillary action do the rest.

This time I used a colored tissue and I got these interesting little haloes, I might have to delve into that a little more, perhaps with more metallic tissues.

I just got back from the Steampunk convention happening this weekend in Silicon Valley. Last night I attended the Abney Park concert, where costumes were virtually required for all attendees.

I had long known I was aligned with the steampunk aesthetic since before I’d heard there was a word for it. I also knew there was a steampunk subculture, but I hadn’t given it any real thought — to me it was all about the visuals. So this convention was my first close look at the culture. I hadn’t even listened to the band before. I could never really imagine what steampunk could be like culturally.

On the surface you could simply say that it was the most well-dressed convention crowd of all time. While there were certain de rigueur conventions in the dress (I felt mighty self-conscious wearing the only top hat — of many dozens — whose brim was not bedecked by a pair of brass goggles, in general the costumes were eclectic and inventive and endlessly entertaining. And everyone looked good. Really, really good. Men were universally dashing and the women, regardless of age, body type or other physical characteristics, looked absolutely dazzling.

But more to the point, the amazing thing about steampunk is its absorptiveness. It has the latitude to elegantly integrate just about any escapist subculture I’ve ever participated in — Goth, Renaissance Faire, pirate, cyberpunk, sci-fi, Dickens Faire, you name it. (Interestingly, that also pretty well describes headliners Abney Park.)

I had kind of been thinking that this airship had already sailed, and that mainstream culture was going to subsume it imminently. And there’s plenty of evidence for this. But now I’m thinking it might have more legs than your typical escapist fare by virtue of its ability to mutate easily. Take a contrasting example like rockabilly — culturally it occupies a fairly narrow zone with Stray Cats, the Cramps, Bettie Page, 90′s swing etc. at its vertices. Stray outside that it’s it’s just not rockabilly any more. So if that’s where you identify, you might be pigeonholed. Pigeonholing steampnk is like scooping up loose mercury by comparison.

A few words about the band (just the headliner as I missed much of opener Platform One): I came in wondering what the hell a “steampunk band” might be, exactly. It’s a weakness of mine that I have trouble getting my head around anything that doesn’t have obvious musical points of reference.The answer, as I mentioned earlier, is that it’s an eclectic mix. The lead singer was engaging and chatty (personality stylistically reminiscent of artist Michael de Meng) and performed admirably despite a case of walking pneumonia (“Whenever I swoon, you gotta take a shot. And if I hit the floor you have to finish the bottle”) — his doumbek added a sensuous line to many of the songs.

The female singer was beautiful, with a lovely voice and sinuous belly-dancer moves, and charming when she spoke. In one memorable performance she holstered (!) her mic and became a ballerina automaton with a few saucy flourishes.

The guitarist and violinist, resplendent in a Kit Stølen headpiece, was competent and funny as well. In order to perform the pieces which required both violin and guitar, audience members would be chosen to hold the violin in such a way that he could grab it quickly in order to switch quickly enough. Naturally these audience members were women, and looked like they belonged on the stage. I didn’t get to see the bassist much from my angle but he seemed fine and was approachable at the merch table after the show.

The keyboardist was nerdy in a cute way, with an appealing stockings-and-garters ensemble peeking from under her turn-of-the-century military uniform. I’m still a little ambivalent about how the synths integrate into the music. I’m looking forward to hearing this evolve a bit to blend better.

Absent was a drummer, and for music that was frequently sensuous, the drum programming was a detriment. A dedicated drummer, or even a dedicated drum programmer, might add considerably to the sound and the live performance.

The instruments were tricked out in steampunk style of course, with gauges and gears and brass ornaments. A guitar famously designed by steampunk wizard Jake von Slatt looked great, as did the mic stand. (They need to add a bit of function to the form, though — the cable fell out right at the crescendo of one of the songs.) The keyboard was very ornate, though its green plasma-zapper centerpiece looked modern and plasticky, and probably should be covered with a sheet of mica to get the isinglass look.

The songs ran a range of styles, which I liked. Plus, the band tends to rework classics in an interesting way, such as the crowd favorite, a crunchy, driving version of the trad “Stretched on Your Grave”.

And I can’t help but mention the crowd itself — lots of sensual gothy swiveling in beautiful costume made the live show a lot more enjoyable than I think just listening to the CD’s would be. I’ll find out — I picked up a couple of CD’s at the merch table.

This woman from Quebec known here and there as La Flaneuse has singlehandedly revived my interest in graphic design. I found her on flickr as copyright depuis 1965, I think for her photography. But the most recent sets of images she has posted has caused me to re-evaluate the relationship between image processing and graphic layout.

Le Temps de Vivre and Le Trou Noir are magnificently elegant harmonies of composition and Photoshop processing. I’ve been looking at the way she uses her palette and the way she washes images in elegant decay to create a tranquil, focused whole, where each would be significantly less interesting and effective without the other.

She’s also revived my interest in typography by her restrained, impactful use of face and whitespace, and even image processing that I forget to do on the text itself. Time to figure out smart filters on type layers in Photoshop…

So I’m just going to confess it right now — just about everything I do in Photoshop for at least a while is probably going to be a shameless aping of this mysterious designer.
Update: Her blog is now at téte de caboche.

First off, I should disclose that I used to operate a hybrid digital/analog studio. I loved the immediacy of my analog console and I think it really helped my creative flow to not have to page through menus.

I adore the Breeders, and I’m thrilled that they’re coming out with a new record. The thing that kills me, is that it’s a record! There’s a notion here about “All Wave” recording, wherein none of the process uses digital anything. I’ll have to wait until I hear the album to decide if this is a good thing or not, but right now I’m a little ambivalent. I think for the Breeders it’s appropriate, but hell, for them, it would be appropriate to sell an album they recorded live into a boombox using its built-in condenser mic. Their music doesn’t need much to become what they wanted it to be, and I can totally understand why they’re resistant to the idea of assembling a song by digital microsurgery.

But I guess the question for me is this: Why eliminate digital entirely from the chain? What does it add that, say, a live recording into a DAT wouldn’t? I know there are audiophiles who have their answer, which probably involves phrases like “it really opens up the soundstage.”

But if it’s going to be consumed digitally, which will be the case for all but about thirty or forty people, then what’s the upside?

Recording in analog, sure. Mixing in analog, I’m a big fan. Some of my favorite mastering gear is analog too, so I can even get behind that. But dogmatically eliminating all digital anything throughout seems to me to be a gimmicky affectation.

I admit this post is premature, as I haven’t heard the recording yet, but it doesn’t matter. I have a lot of equipment for enjoying analog media — a USB turntable, cassette decks and so on. But my receiver immediately digitizes everything anyway, so at this point it would be a major pain in the ass for me to listen to this record the way it was meant to be listened to, in a pure analog mode, end to end. And that is not the way I listen to music — it’s on my iPod or in my car or wherever. And it’s got to work wherever I am, so I’m just going to digitize it anyway.

Recently I dropped about 50 pounds and I have been enjoying the self-confidence you get when you look healthy. But as I made my way through a crowd of the young and hip and edgy and beautiful while walking through downtown San Jose, I realized that the kids in this scene had no reason whatever to give me a moment’s notice. I’m just some balding grownup walking by on the street. Even if I had gotten around to getting my tattoo it would mean little to them since the fact of having a tattoo no longer signifies anything at all. Maybe if they were Edward Gorey fans I’d make their radar, but other than that there’s little I could do for my outward appearance to create that instant “one of us” impression.

Last night I went to see a band at the Blank Club called 187CALM. This was a band that my beloved old roommate Luz Longa adored and when she moved out she took the only CD of theirs I had ever seen before or since. I saw them once or twice, I think both times with Mute Angst Envy, like 14 years ago, and then the band stopped doing shows ten years ago. So when I saw a poster advertising a reunion show it brought a whirlwind of memories back for me. (It took them a while to surface though, I’m afraid. “Was that Luz’ band? No wait, was that her friends? I remember having some files for one of their show posters on my Mac back then — did I design that one? Or just help?” Well, eventually I put the pieces together, remembered the band and even my fruitless search for their CD’s, and resolved to go. While it was nice to think that I was finally getting out to shows again — kinda makes me feel more alive — I was really just going there to see the band and buy those elusive CD’s.

I showed up early and listened to the blisteringly loud band DESA (“Hmm, they’re too loud. Does that mean I’m too old? KISS might have been right.”). The band was OK; they played one song they claimed was new that I quite liked. I didn’t care for the singer all that much but I really liked the song structures and the performance from the other musicians. I realized I don’t have the vocabulary any more to describe bands (“I guess you’d say… progcore?”) Lacking anything better to do I hit the merch table and stocked up on those hard-to-find 187CALM CDs. I got a free poster which I foolishly accepted — now I had to keep it safe all night. Then I sat at the bar and had a couple of pints of Guinness, thinking about the futility of trying to meet people at a show when the band is this loud and the lighting is this dim and you don’t know anyone there. Thinking about how I actually might know someone there but even if either could recognize the other in the light and after all those years — would either of us remember the other’s name?

I headed to the restroom and was forced to gaze at the Nostalgia Wall above the urinal, plastered in vintage show posters for Cactus Club, Marsugi’s, Club X events, it was all there — these were SHOWS I HAD BEEN TO.

Mercifully the headliner finally hit the stage and I got into position. I found myself feeling incredibly and uncharacteristically self-conscious, clutching my merchandise, feeling very bald, wondering why I put on a Skinny Puppy shirt before the show (“Is this just silly? *I* know I wear it often, but does it just look like I’m trying to prove I belong in a nightclub?”). It was almost as though losing all the weight made me MORE self-conscious. I guess I expected that to somehow make me younger or something.

I found myself wishing I had invited Lisa Dewey — she put out the most recent Mute Angst Envy record on her label, maybe she likes these guys too! And being there with someone else would have taken the edge off of all the silly shit I was feeling in a heartbeat. But it was far too late for that. I tried to remind myself I was just there for the music and concentrate on the band.

For their part the band was great. More varied in style than I remember and it was indeed music I can still enjoy now. Even when things went wrong the band was charming and entertaining. And their celebrated atmosphere did create an agreeable mood which is nice at a show. I’d certainly go see them every chance I had, even now. But next time I’ll make sure to bring somebody with.

I thought about staying after to talk to the bandmembers as I often do, knowing that at least we could talk about Luz, but I just wanted to disconnect from the whole depressing scene. I left that night, never having uttered a word to anyone.